Thursday, August 21, 2014

Seventy-five years ago this week, the world was turned upside down when Hitler and Stalin signed a pact of alliance. Within days Hitler invaded Poland, starting World War II. Roger Moorhouse, a historian, has a new book out on the momentous but often-forgotten "Devils' Alliance."

Monday, October 01, 2012

Luisa Weiss tells what happens when she broke off her engagement to a handsome New Yorker, quit her dream job, and found her way to a new life, a new man, and a new home in Berlin—one recipe at a time. In My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes) she shares stories of mending her broken heart through cooking.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

When the Brooklyn chamber-pop outfit Clare And The Reasons decided to make its third studio album, the band realized they wanted a change of pace. So the group up and moved to Berlin. The band joins us in studio for a live performance of songs from the new record.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Brooklyn chamber-pop outfit Clare and The Reasons moved to Berlin to record their latest album, KR-51. We asked band members Clare Manchon and Olivier Manchon five questions about the German city they called home for a time. It's a Brooklynites Guide to Berlin.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

As nations vie for athletic superiority at the London Olympics, the Greater London Authority has created an international measuring stick to assess a location’s cultural merit. See where New York ranks.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

The opening of Europe's newest airport has been pushed back yet again, infuriating airlines, embarrassing local officials and complicating the start of the summer travel season.

Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) was to have begun welcoming traffic on June 3rd. An airport spokesperson even took a group of international reporters on a tour of the construction site last week, assuring the journalists -- who were outfitted in hardhats, boots and safety vests -- that everything was on track for an opening date that was just 30 days away.

That was then; this is now.

A statement on the airport's website reads "the planned inauguration of the airport on 3 June 2012 has become a race against time" and that problems with the airport's fire protection systems has necessitated a postponement of the opening -- which "will commence operations after summer holiday period."

BER is designed to consolidate and expand air traffic from the city's two airports, Tegel and Schonenberg. On the evening of June 2nd, those two airports were to have closed to the public. Now they must remain open indefinitely -- and try to accommodate the flight schedule of carriers who were banking on BER.

The postponement is particularly vexing to Germany's two largest air carriers, which had been planning on the new airport to be open for the start of the summer travel season. The CEO of airberlin vented his frustration in an email to media. “We have to work around the change of plan, which presents us with a huge challenge," said Hartmut Mehdorn. "It presents immense logistical problems for all involved and will also cause additional costs which have yet to be calculated.” Lufthansa -- the country's largest carrier -- had been planning to substantially increase the number of routes it offers in and out of Berlin. Airline officials said Tuesday they were scrambling to get additional landing slots at Tegel.

The postponement not only presents logistical challenges. The city is blanketed with signs advertising June 3rd as BER's opening date. As of May 7th, there were "Danke, Tegel" posters all over that airport, thanking it for years of service.

View a slideshow of photos taken of Berlin Brandenburg Airport on May 4, 2012, below. (All photos by Kate Hinds.)

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Detroit and Berlin both know something about abandoned buildings. After the fall of the wall when the former east opened up, parts of Berlin looked a lot like Detroit today, where scores of buildings stood unclaimed, their purpose unclear. While officials worked on a city’s future, Germans like Dimitri Hegemann, relished in exploring the relics of Berlin’s industrial past.

"We were very curious...so when I could go in… I was curious like a young boy," he says. "What is this building? Oh, it’s empty? Let’s look inside. And this happened 1,000 times. We just invaded. This was, you must understand, the frame of these days. The atmosphere was burning. It was an amazing situation."

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Detroit has long been called the birthplace of techno, and helped bring house music to a global stage in the 1980s — the kind of impact that still resonates around the world today, in the form of tens of thousands of auditory permutations. Berlin, which gave rise to "The Berlin School" of electronic music in the 1970s, has been equally influential — and is still a pilgrimage destination for DJs and electronic music aficionados from all over the world. So it's no surprise that DJ Rolando, internationally-known techno DJ from Detroit, is also a favorite in Berlin.

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

WDET's Martina Guzman spent six weeks in the German city of Berlin, exploring a long-recognized but underreported connection between that former manufacturing giant and the Motor City. In this post, which you can hear from the radio here, she gives a first-person account of visiting Berlin and talking with several people that recognize the connection between the two cities, especially their diminished but still "sexy" industrial prowess.

Friday, June 26, 2009

On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy addressed a vast crowd of Germans on Rudolph Wilde Platz near the Berlin Wall. In his speech, Kennedy condemns the wall separating East from West, calling it a "vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system" and praised ...

Friday, November 02, 2007

Techno, raves, cabaret, punk, poetry, erotica ... it’s all happening in Berlin. We sent cultural correspondent Fiona Chutney to sample some of the city's famed nightlife. (Chutney is a character of the writer and performer Iris Bahr.)

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